What to document in your journal on a daily basis • The Rise Collective

I’m a huge fan of self documentation and I created a life design planner to help people to do that.

As you may know, self documentation is one of the best ways to identify your patterns (both the ones you like and the ones you don’t like), what your unconscious is telling you, continue doing what works, and make changes.

I’ve been journaling since I was about eight years old. In fact, when I went to visit my parents who were moving out of their home, I went through all of my old journals. There was a lot of BS in those journals (“Suzie said that Mary said…”), and reading it, I realized how repetitive my thought patterns were as a child and young adult.

Now, I tend to look back at my journals to examine my thoughts, synthesize the messages, readings, curiosities, arguments, doubts, experiments, insights, dreams, highlights, and more. I synthesize about every two weeks so that I can be relatively confident I’m not missing anything that is coming through from my unconscious or from the other realms.

Journaling, planning, expressing, writing, listing, reflecting has led to insights for me and my clients… And insights are one of the keys to internal and external transformation.

This blog is about how you can document and record in your journal in the beginning of the day, during the day, and in the evening.

Learn how to journal daily with these writing prompts and journaling ideas. This article has inspiration and tips for how to use your journal for writing and life discovery.

Use your journal not as a diary, but as a place to store highlights from your life that you wish to reflect on later when you synchronize and develop your highlights. It’s a place to store all of the seemingly disjointed pieces of your daily experience. This will create a concentrated sacred ground where you can work through your unconscious, and the messages from the other realms. This practice cultivates the imagination, and triggers the mind to pay attention to life, both intellect and intuition.

You may have noticed that if you don’t record your insights as soon as they occur, you rapidly forget them because something more urgent comes up for work, tending to the family, or putting out fires of modern life. Your journal will help you stay on your path and tend to the depths. Recording all of this eliminates the need to be struck again and again by the same insight. Instead, process your findings and insights more quickly and efficiently.

And remember, synchronizing your notes and reflecting on them once a week is perhaps the most important part of self- documentation. If you are engaging in self-documentation but never go back to review and reflect, it will do you no good.

How to journal with morning reflections

Journal about your dreams

There is a lot of information from your guides, your ancestors, and your unconscious available to you in your dreams. Record your dreams if you can remember them, and if you only remember pieces of your dream, that is valuable too. Write your dream in the present tense so that it makes more sense to you as you are interpreting it. Record how you felt in the dream, what you think it may mean, people who were in the dream. When you go back and review your self documentation, you may be able to see what your unconscious is telling you: what you do or don’t want to happen, what archetypes that you are working with, what might be in your shadow.

Journal about your gratitude

Set the tone for the day with recording what you are grateful for. We have all heard how beneficial it is to be grateful for what you have and to want what you have. It really is a great way to start off the day.

How to journal throughout the day

Bring a notebook with you in your purse so that you can make notes about your experience throughout the day. Once or twice a week, synthesize everything and put it in your larger journal so that you can identify the themes and messages.

Ideas

In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says that ideas are living and breathing. They come into us, and if we don’t use them, they leave us. Record your ideas week after week until you complete the ideas so that you can give them the attention that they deserve.

Insights

An insight is a new perspective or way of thinking. They can come any time. One key to transforming how we approach the world and our work. They can come from books, people, conversations. A Course in Miracles talks about how a shift in perspective is a miracle.

Synchronicity

Synchronicities can also be called “Go-Incidences” that show you which way you should go or continue. It’s a message from the quantum field that reinforces the choices that you’re making.

Curiosities

Anything that you’re feeling drawn to, wanting to find out more about. Write those down and make sure that you are able to come back to it and research it when you have more time.

Readings

I love to write down my tarot readings, astrological readings, human design readings, enneagram discoveries, and anything that helps me to understand myself, my strengths, my weaknesses, and my ways more completely.

How to journal with evening reflections

Compliments

We all want to have validation from the inside out, not needing anyone else to tell us that we’re good enough. At the same time, reflections and compliments can help us see our impact in the world: these are things that other people see about us that we may not see about ourselves.

One fun way to work with compliments is to write them on a scrap of paper, put them in a jar on your desk. When you need a pick-me-up, look in your compliment jar.